Pieces of the Past
by JukeboxJulia
Summary: Set in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. After Claire gets impaled by the Indoraptor, she starts to see things. The past, the future... Things that give her a reason to keep fighting.


**A/N:** _I wrote this after seeing_ Fallen Kingdom _in the theatre, so if the scene is a bit off from how it is in the movie, it's because I couldn't go back and check. But I think for the most part it's pretty compliant! This was also just an excuse to show that Claire (and probably Owen and Maisie) wants the domestic fluff that we all want, too._

/

A scream, the shattering of glass, an explosion of pain so powerful Claire is sure her body doesn't even have the capacity to feel it all.

They happen all at once, remarkably fast, yet almost in slow motion.

Claire feels the searing pain in her leg, sees the flash of teeth through synthetic branches, the _Indoraptor_ 's breath close enough to condense on skin. She'd brushed with death more times than she could count in the past twenty-four hours, each horrifying new exploit pushing out the memory of the last, but this time, she was certain she was going to die.

Claire can reason her way out of almost any situation, especially when Owen is behind her, but the pain—which she realizes is a result of the _Indoraptor_ 's killer claw digging down into her leg ( _into her bone?_ )—makes it impossible to think clearly.

It's pure pain. The dinosaur hasn't pulled its dagger from her skin yet; she's not bleeding out, but she might be in a few moments, if the murderous hybrid doesn't eat her first.

But the pain is enough. Enough to send her reeling, disoriented, unbound, untethered, into the high-pitched chaos of everything happening around her.

And then Claire sinks.

She feels herself go down—not physically, but somehow within herself, as though her brain has dropped into her stomach. She's somewhere else, somewhere dark and getting darker. The only thing that's there for certain is a high-pitched ringing.

Until the images come. She sees things somewhere behind her eyes, fast and all at once, but real as the ground below and in perfect detail.

She's a kid again, with her sister Karen and her mother and father.

She's just graduated high school, fresh out, and she already is planning her senior year in college.

And then she's in college, young and brilliant, and she can feel the ambition under her skin like a film of heat.

She's interning at Jurassic World. She's looking at a dinosaur, a triceratops, and understanding for the first time exactly what humans are capable of. Exactly what she's capable of.

She's at her sister's wedding, in a black dress that she bought at the last minute, feeling only a little guilty that she's counting down the seconds until the ceremony is over and she can leave.

There's a void… Claire knows that at this point there's supposed to be important events from her mid-twenties, and at the time, there were: moments of pride as she climbed her way through the ranks of Jurassic World. But none of them seem relevant now.

And then there's that dreaded day. Her nephews look older than they should—much older than the last time she saw them, which was apparently too long ago—and they're so much like _people_ now that Claire has no idea how to interact with them.

Several adrenaline-filled flashes of _Indominus rex_ teeth and claws and those awful eyes later and her nephews are still there, plus Owen Grady, all of them suddenly infinitely more important to her than they were mere hours ago. Zach and Gray look suddenly _young_ , too young, heartbreakingly young.

(And Owen looks strangely smoldering…)

Her sister, her brother-in-law, the absolute bliss of the reunion, of simply being alive.

Owen Grady's lips on hers, his body so close, their beings so heatedly close, everything electrified, amplified from the rapture of not being dead…

The sickening, churning hole in her when he walks out the door and she knows that will be her last memory of him.

"Fuck it," she tells herself.

And then, like some act of an ironic god, seeing him again at the dawn of everything, meeting again at the gates of Hell.

Cue fire, disaster, claws, teeth, predators, blood, fresh horror in all its purest forms.

"Oh, I see." The words are clear and concise and coldly removed enough to exact the truth Claire had been trying not to tempt herself with. "You think you're going to _care for her_."

Another voice interrupts, belonging somewhere else, in some other timeline.

"What kind of person doesn't want kids?"

Claire's sister again. After announcing her first pregnancy, either genuinely trying to enhance Claire's life or else just make her jealous.

"Um, I don't know," Claire says without meaning to. It's a memory and she can't say anything that hasn't already been said, isn't scripted, set in stone like a mosquito trapped in amber by the unrelenting passage of time. "What kind of person am I?"

Karen gives Claire a look, a long look, the kind that she might give a stranger or a very old friend, then knits her eyebrows and tries to shrug it off. "A _Claire_ kinda person, I guess."

At the time, Claire thought she had meant it, thought she really didn't ever want kids, but something changed after the end of Jurassic World. Something opened up in her, made her a more nurturing person. She cares now, cares so much. Even for the _dinosaurs_ , the should-be-extinct creatures that once tried to kill her and her family.

Claire sucks in a breath and she's back at the Lockwood Estate, bleeding profusely now and fearing for her life, as usual. She wonders how so much could've happened between breaths, and then all she can think of is how important it is that Maisie survives...

And then she's projected out of the exhibit again, away from the pain and the raw horrors of the prehistoric world. Before, she sank into herself but now she's beyond herself. Beyond everything, in a warm and study cabin that hasn't been built yet.

Some other part of her _knows_ that it hasn't been built yet, that she's in some hypothetical future. In reality, it's the skeleton of a cabin in some wilderness miles away, nothing more than an assembly of boards in the outline of a home, like the sketchy lines before an art piece.

And yet, she's sheltered and dry and the dark cabin is lit by hot, dripping candles whose wax she can smell on her skin and windows that let the falling sun come in in peach-colored rays.

She's setting a table—it's rustic and all the utensils are mismatched, but there's the smell of hot food overtaking the kitchen. Across the room, Owen is standing over the stove, quietly singing a classic rock song Claire should know the name of but doesn't.

"You're gonna burn it," a young, accented voice says knowingly.

"I'm not gonna burn it." Owen brushes the girl off, but the air starts to fill with undertones of smoke.

"She's right, Owen," Claire interjects, though she knows he's so headstrong that her input is liable to make Owen burn their dinner to a crisp out of pure stubbornness.

"It's all good, okay?" Owen says, predictably, then turns away from the stove and sits down across from Claire.

They exchange affectionate pleasantries—which makes Claire so nostalgic her heart hurts—as Maisie takes the food out of the oven. Claire can't tell what they're having because it's in a covered dish, but it smells spectacular, despite being a little overdone.

And then they're all sitting around the table, close in so many ways, the warmth and smell of the food in the air like a soft, thick quilt.

"Let's all say grace," Owen says, which catches Claire off guard because she hasn't said grace since she was a kid and she's certain Owen hasn't said grace in his life. But Maisie doesn't react further than grabbing Owen and Claire's hands, and so Claire does the same, takes the hand of the man she loves and the child she just wants to protect, and Owen starts thanking God. "It's remarkable," he says, "how we've all come together, and I couldn't be more grateful. We were all on such different paths, were all such different people, and now here we are. A former businesswoman, a has-been scientist, an orphan… All of us were pieces of the past, brought together, brought to each other, to make us here. Make us whole, now."

 _Pieces of the past_ …

That struck something in Claire; she'd heard it before.

And now, as she's struggling to remember where, the whole cabin had frozen. Owen, his mouth half-open, stuck between words. Maisie, her eyes shut, her hands extended like some sculpture of innocence. Even the trees outside stopped their rustling, everything perfectly still.

 _Pieces of the past_ , Claire wracks her brain. The words were used to describe the dinosaurs, back at the Lockwood mansion, she remembers, but reality doesn't come crashing in so fast. Instead, those four words stick in her mind and she can _see_ them now, the pieces of the past, bright red spots floating across from the corners of her vision, meeting in the middle, blocking out everything in the cabin.

And when they fade, the cabin is gone. Owen and Maisie are in grave danger, the _Indoraptor_ is still on the loose. She knows that vision, which can't have lasted more than a second, was a fragile hope, a fleeting dream that can never come to pass.

Still, it's something worth fighting for.

Claire needs them to survive, all three of them. Needed to push past the pain, to get on without Owen, because they couldn't leave the kid to fend for herself with a superpredator on the loose.

She will find a way, she and Owen together.

He tries to tend to her, but her injury is just pain, probably not life-threatening. She can blot out the pain with hope, so she takes his lips against hers and tells him to go after Maisie.

And it takes a while, but she manages to bandage herself up and she tries to stand. It ends up being a staggering ordeal, but once she's up, she doesn't waste any time.

She has to find Owen and Maisie.

They have to have each other's backs; maybe it's just wishful thinking, but Claire feels they're something of a family now. A strange family made of pieces of the past, wielded together by danger and sacrifice.

/

 **A/N:** _Thank you so much for reading this! It would mean the absolute world to me if you left a review; I live to hear your thoughts. Thanks again! :o)_


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